Is cryonicists’ selfishness distance induced?

Tyler‘s criticism of cryonics, shared by others including me at times:

Why not save someone else’s life instead?

This applies to all consumption, so is hardly a criticism of cryonics, as people pointed out. Tyler elaborated that it just applies to expressive expenditures, which Robin pointed out still didn’t pick out cryonics over the the vast assortment of expressive expenditures that people (who think cryonics is selfish) are happy with. So why does cryonics instinctively seem particularly selfish?

I suspect the psychological reason cryonics stands out as selfish is that we rarely have the opportunity to selfishly splurge on something so far in the far reaches of far mode as cryonics, and far mode is the standard place to exercise our ethics.

You’re not meant to be selfish in far mode! Freeze a fair princess you are truly in love with or something. Far mode livens our passion for moral causes and abstract values. If Robin is right, this is because it’s safe to be ethical about things that won’t affect you yet it still sends signals to those around you about your personality. It’s a truly mean person who won’t even claim someone else a long way away should have been nice fifty years ago. So when technology brings the potential for far things to affect us more, we mostly don’t have the built in selfishness required to zealously chase the offerings.

This theory predicts that other personal expenditures on far mode items will also seem unusually selfish. Here are some examples of psychologically distant personal expenditures to test this:

space tourism

donating to/working on life extension because you want to live forever

traveling in far away socially distant countries without claiming you are doing it to benefit or respect the locals somehow

astronomy for personal gain

buying naming rights to stars

lottery tickets

maintaining personal collections of historical artifacts

building statues of yourself to last long after you do

recording your life so future people can appreciate you

leaving money in your will to do something non-altruistic

voting for the party that will benefit you most

supporting international policies to benefit your country over others

I’m not sure how selfish these seem compared to other non-altruistic purchases. Many require a lot of money, which makes anything seem selfish I suspect. What do you think?

If this theory is correct, does it mean cryonics is unfairly slighted because of a silly quirk of psychology? No. Your desire to be ethical about far away things is not obviously less real or legitimate than your desire to be selfish about near things, assuming you act on it. If psychological distance really is morally relevant to people, it’s consistent to think cryonics too selfish and most other expenditures not. If you don’t want psychological distance to be morally relevant then you have an inconsistency to resolve, but how you should resolve it isn’t immediately obvious. I suspect however that as soon as you discard cryonics as too selfish you will get out of far mode and use that money on something just as useless to other people and worth less to yourself, but in the realm more fitting for selfishness. If so, you lose out on a better selfish deal for the sake of not having to think about altruism. That’s not altruistic, it’s worse than selfishness.

“why isn’t buying cryonics for others seen as especially praiseworthy?”

Because it’s not seen at all. The public image of cryonics is of individuals saving themselves.

The psychological theory of near/far-ism seems like it’s just a big long list of items, filed under “near” or “far” by the theorists for a variety of reasons that don’t necessarily go together. I suspect that a sharper analysis would disaggregate the concepts somewhat. But anyway, I don’t believe hostility to cryonics is about hostility to “selfishness in far mode”. It’s about hostility to saving yourself from something to which everyone else is resigned. Of course, as a Celia Green acolyte from way back, I might be expected to produce such an interpretation.

This is Katja Grace’s blog. It is about the idiosyncratic class of things Katja considers to be on the frontier of important and interesting. Empirically, it tends to be about human behavior, social institutions and rules, anthropic reasoning, personal experimentation and improvement, philanthropy, and the prospect of robots replacing humans. Katja is responsible for omissions as well as actions, and aspires to save the world at some point.